Anatomy of Art

Vision and Execution is an extreme simplification of the creative process. Let us now go a little deeper, and name some of the key principles of the process. "The Art of Art" dedicates a chapter for each of these key principles; you can think of this post as a "skeletal view" of the entire book.

Consider context. The first thing to do when approaching deliberate art is to consider what we want to achieve, and why. This is especially true when our current work is part of a bigger project, e.g. a musical soundtrack or a single panel in a comic strip. Understanding the context of our work is critical for a successful result.



Form Ideas. Where do ideas come from? With deliberate art, we usually don't have the luxury of waiting around for divine inspiration to come. Instead, we take action: we search for and collect good ideas, then use them as raw material to sculpt our original, custom-made concept.




Sketch your vision. we use our original ideas to form a mental experience of the finished work, as detailed and captivating as we can make it. Then we capture it in a quick sketch, called the "Proof of Concept".




Get familiar with your material. Achieving loose, rich results is only possible when we're theoretically and intimately familiar with our materials. With a limited investment in research and practice, we can turn a potentially stressful and stiff experience into a flowing, enjoyable creative process.



Work in passes. The execution stage starts with a very rough full-sized version of the vision. Then, we start developing it in passes. Each pass advances the entire work just a simple step toward the vision, until the result is close enough.




Chunk it. Advancing in "pure" passes throughout the entire work, is not always possible . Sometimes we need to chunk our work to manageable pieces, each of which may be a complete deliberate artwork in itself, requiring all the key principles above. Massive artistic projects may be made of thousands of deliberate artworks chunks.


Sketch! Being able to summarize a complex idea in a rough yet clear sketch, is the one basic skill required for all the key principles listed above. I call it "the creative atom", because all artwork is literally made of successive sketching - even (and especially) the most furnished and polished work. As we become better in sketching, our artwork becomes exponentially better.

Cover design option

I like this option, it really goes well with the premise of the book - the creative process as the unknown, shadow world of art. Here's a better way of saying it:

[From "The Art of Art": The art of the Process >Process Awareness]

For most people - including quite a few artists - great art is a kind of magic: the talented artist (gifted by genes, the gods, or luck) experiences a supernatural moment of inspiration, and his pen (or CGI software, or word processor) starts pouring out pure gold. Believing that this is what the work of a "real" artist should look like, no wonder a mere mortal artist would feel frustrated that he alone, talentless and uninspired as he is, must work hard to achieve results. Such an artist would do well to remember the following quote from Michelangelo (also known as "the divine"): "if people only knew how hard I work to gain my mastery, it wouldn't seem so wonderful at all."

Freshness

[From "The Art of Art": About the Book >what is good art?]

Freshness

To me, freshness is almost the "raison d'etre" of art. The whole idea of art is to create, even in the smallest way, an experience that did not exist in the universe before.

There are those who hear the word "fresh" and think of breaking boundaries, shuttering conventions, revolution, something completely different and strange and alien. This is how we get questionable artistic endeavors such as pictures hanging upside down, sculptures made of peacock droppings, or artists like the one I saw on a TV show, whose idea of originality is to tie himself on a rope from the ceiling, cover himself with paint, and then "draw" by repeatedly hurling his body onto the canvas.Well, that's not what I mean by "original". Such desperate gimmicks can only come, I think, from minds that are desperately out of real creative ideas.

The kind of originality I'm referring to is much more subtle and sophisticated. It contains something personal: each of us is an original personality, with a unique life story in the history of mankind. To connect our art to this inherent personal uniqueness, is an important part of true originality.

Another side of real freshness can be described as "unexpected": something a little surprising, off the beaten path, that injects some randomness into an otherwise familiar subject. This can come in the form of an interesting style, a unique detail the juices up the work, or perhaps a unique combination of ingredients.

In the first class of my character design course, I always ask my students to design a pirate. Most of their initial designs contain a wooden leg and an eye patch, props we would all expect a pirate to have. Then I ask them to make a new sketch, and this time add something unusual. What I usually get are pirates wearing some bizarre props such as a flower in the hair or women underwear. These are still not truely fresh ideas. They are the kind of smarty-pants originality of the type I mentioned above. But take a look at the pirate Jack Sparrow in "Pirates of the Caribbean", and you see what a truly original pirate character can be: Johnny Depp took the myth of the pirate, combined it with a drunken rock star, gave him a unique way of walking, , a particular way of speaking - and created an instant classic. Jack Sparrow is definitely a pirate, but not in the way you would expect it - and that's true freshness.

Johnny Depp's Jack Sparrow became an instant Classic.